In Universes is the debut novel from Emet North, whose resume includes NASA research in observational cosmology. The story begins with Raffi, a grad student researching evidence of black holes on a NASA grant, wondering about the multiverse. While studying, they meet and fall for Britt, a thoughtful sculptor, but critically someone whom Raffi almost got to know once before, but to whom they were never quite brave enough to speak. From this moment of “what if”—that is, what if Raffi had been able to take the step and say hello to Britt when they were children—the story proceeds, chapter by chapter, through increasingly strange iterations of Raffi’s lives. These are the different branching realities she studies—lives where they spoke to Britt, lives where they were in love, where they loved other people, lives where they were different people, different genders, made different choices. The same characters recur again and again, orbiting around each other in different ways but always revolving back around to the same themes that have driven Raffi since the very first story began.

Because of the context of this first Raffi—as a scientist, and a scientist interested in precisely the multi-worlds theory that the book uses to explore its story—physics is initially the lens of this novel: Raffi sees the world through the physics they study, even as she worries she’s not good enough at it, not sufficient. Speaking of their rugby player housemate, she says that he “seemed too delicate for such a violent sport, but I knew violence was not proportional to mass, latent as it was in something as small as an atom”; much of the chapter continues that way, couching similes, metaphors, comparisons, and even simple observations about the world and people around the character in the language of physics, even when not embedding the concepts themselves. This is all the more interesting for that fact that this is a book that proves to be less interested in the practical implications of the multiverse than the philosophical. And even this pales in comparison to the novel’s main focus: the personal.

As the story moves on from its initial Raffi, it meanders away from that initial scientific grounding, though it retains the more philosophical musings on the multiverse in the background of a more character-first focus, a focus which marks it out as something special amongst many of its genre peers. By constantly reframing the narrative as it slips inexorably from world to similar-and-different world, North triangulates around Raffi as a character. Each new universe presents a different life—different circumstances, different choices—and over the iterations we begin to see the core parts that echo through each, the Raffi that persists despite the differences.

What emerges is a deep, compelling portrait of a flawed, hurting character. Raffi is depressed. Raffi has hideous levels of imposter syndrome. Raffi worries about friends, lovers, aunts, cousins, with varying levels of necessity. Raffi makes mistakes—sometimes really horrible ones. In one universe, Raffi’s friend Britt needs money to take her beloved horse to the vet, but, teenager that she is, Raffi freezes up in the company of a cool girl, cannot bear to be seen by her to be kind to, to be friendly with, the outcast Britt. Not handing over that money comes with consequences, and the narrative follows through on these unflinchingly.

But then, because it gives us all these different universes, we also see what could have been different.

More than anything, Raffi is throughout the book haunted by their failures. Throughout every single narrative, she cannot seem to drag herself away from all the things for which she holds herself responsible, no matter how hard she runs—whether fleeing an academic post to learn to snowboard, or an unsatisfying relationship to walk into the sea night after night, Raffi is a person with so many things she wants to leave behind but cannot, because she cannot face taking the actions required to achieve escape.

With close first-person narratives like this, one of the common themes of discussion can be a viewpoint character’s relatability, the appeal they hold for the reader. North seems to sidestep that discussion entirely. I don’t think I can even say if I like or dislike Raffi, because the narrative is almost too close: I know them too well for superficial preferences, and the brutal, honest clarity of the portrait we’re given burns away all that is peripheral, leaving only knowledge. Raffi is neither relatable, nor likeable. They are simply known.

There are two things in particular that North does to ease us into this approach to characterisation. First, that scientific lens: Raffi has a distinctive mode of thought in which we become embedded. Aside from the use of terminology, there’s a very technical, cold sort of clarity to how they assess their own emotional state. It often feels analytical, almost surgical. Even when they’re unsure, Raffi is precise in how they address their own state of mind, and it becomes very easy to slip into understanding with them:

My desire was like a feral cat, begging for attention one minute then hissing and showing its teeth the next. I blamed this capriciousness for the wreck I’d made of my relationship with Caleb.

In this passage, Raffi identifies an aspect of their character, describes it in an instantly vivid way, and then analyses it, fits it into the pattern of their life, of cause and effect. Many of the descriptions Raffi uses for their emotions are like this: exaggerated, dramatic, and yet also somehow external, separate to themselves. I have read some stories where this kind of self-knowledge feels artificial, projecting too omniscient a level of knowledge onto a single, human narrator. But North keeps this just the right side of the line, tempering it with the coldness of Raffi’s tone. After reading a few thoughts like this, it becomes clear how disconnected Raffi is from their emotions, analysing them for patterns like stars in NASA images, in the hope of figuring out some way to work through them where intuitive response has failed.

This remains throughout each portrait of Raffi, one of several points of continuity as many other things change. In the worst moments we see of Raffi’s life, this mode of self-reflection is desperately sad and poignant. Critically, while this continuity is evident, each Raffi is also equally and evidently different. With their varying tones and vocabularies, they layer up into a choir of similar but distinct voices, hitting the same notes but never quite in the same way. The distinctions are incredibly subtle, hard to define in the micro, in the specific choice of word here and there, but after reading the third or fourth chapter, meeting the third or fourth Raffi, it became extremely obvious to me—and once looked for, this differentiation became even more obvious in the subsequent iterations. In Universes is a story of subtle changes through layered worlds, and those changes are embedded right into the core of the novel’s approach to character, into the way each version of the protagonist examines herself and her world, as well as the choices she makes and situations she inhabits.

The second way in which North achieves this effect is a little more nebulous: It is simply that the prose is beautiful. As in the above excerpt, North continuously finds evocative but fanciful ways to describe both the abstract and the fantastical, without straying from the grounded narrative. It’s a story so focussed on Raffi and their emotional and philosophical state, that excessive meandering into landscape description would detract from its focus; but what moments we do get are always enchanting even when describing something horrible. One of my lingering visual memories of this novel will be of the corpses in an early chapter, packed with sawdust to preserve them, their fatal wounds decoratively filled, making them into grotesque memorial art.

So much for description of externalities. But when this  careful artistry of prose is turned back inwards, back to Raffi’s thoughts, it not only serves that same aesthetic purpose, but also develops and adds to another aspect of her personality that keeps threading back through the stories: Art lives in her soul as much as science does.

The deft attraction of this, the subtlety of it, extends beyond the character portrait, though. That act of triangulation across the different stories is also used to reframe the novel’s themes, so that they, too, keep recurring without ever feeling over-emphasised. North isn’t making it hard to see what the key issues here are—depression, imposter syndrome, the ability to love while being unsure of oneself, the ability to be vulnerable with those closest to us, community—but nor are they feeling the need to spell them out, just in case they weren’t clear enough. There’s just the right balance of information given, and faith in the reader granted, for the effect to be one of conclusions implied, rather than overwhelming possibilities spelt out.

All this makes the approach to each one of the Raffis richer, every time approached from a different angle. This collage effect, alongside that deft character portraiture—and achieved in much the same way—is why In Universes is so successful for me. In each specific instance of a theme being discussed, or a motif recurring, the echo sounds subtly. Each approach is often fleeting. But in the macro, that subtlety fades away, and becomes clarity instead, and—because this is a relatively brief novel—never straying into didacticism. There isn’t the time. Each new universe does add something new—and as it progresses, often increasingly speculatively, the story comes to a close before the repetition stops adding new insights. To see a thing once is interesting. Twice might be a potential pattern. Thrice is confirmation (and a nice average for the graph that must be drawn to support the conclusion and get a good mark on the experiment).

Little jokes aside, though, and for all that a love of science does underlie many of these chapters, this isn’t a science fiction book interested in science. I am not certain how much I would call it a science fiction book at all, even, because it doesn’t feel in conversation with the genre. There are no visible threads leading back to older works of fiction, no obvious debts. Instead, it seems to have been inspired by real science, and more so philosophy, but owing its literary debts far more to the tone of mimetic fiction.

Not in content, but in tone, I am reminded of authors like Julia Armfield, for whom the intimate personal portrait is the driving force behind the power of their fiction, and whose work is tied so deeply into their characters that sympathy feels inevitable. And so, too, In Universes is above all interested in people, and in one person in particular, examining them again and again, through different lenses, bringing them slowly through world after world and context after context, until possibly finding one in which they can be both themself, and also perhaps at peace. North builds everything up—the world, the depth of its speculative aspects, the relationships, and the character of Raffi—in delicate layers, and the whole can only be truly appreciated once the final chapter is reached, when the distance from the beginning is evident. Raffi spends the story, chapter by chapter, running. You cannot understand the momentum while they’re moving—it’s only measurable once they’ve stopped.